


My Sunshine

by OxfordOctopus



Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [30]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Disasters, Drowning, Emotional Hurt, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mental Anguish, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-28
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:09:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23362228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,You make me happy when skies are gray,You'll never know dear, how much I love you,Please don't take my sunshine away.Leviathan wins and Brockton Bay drowns.
Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [30]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1435474
Comments: 6
Kudos: 72





	My Sunshine

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning for: character death, some vague imagery involving someone being crushed under rubble, and descriptions of mass death due to a natural disaster.

The sky was impossibly clear and blue, little more than wispy white clouds marring its surface. The sun, with it, bore down on her like a weight, cooking her from the outside in, making her costume stick, slick with her sweat, with blood. She could barely breathe, her chest was tight, but she wasn’t wounded, wasn’t _hurt_ ; she’d survived, against all odds, and in decent enough shape.

Taylor retched a bit, bringing up her arm uselessly, covering over the faceplate of her mask.

Water stretched out for miles, an endless sea of muddy browns, bloated bodies floating along its surface, caught on outcropped rebar and concrete. It was only her bugs that kept her from swimming with them, that had stopped her from melting down entirely; drowning her bugs, forcing them to find her a path across the mud-slick concrete just beneath the surface of the waters of what had once been her hometown, her _father’s_ hometown.

There wasn’t anything left of Brockton Bay anymore, not unless you counted the corpses of both buildings and people.

Another shaky step, nearly catching on the edge of her outcrop, carried her the last of the distance to the jut, to one of the only places the water hadn’t surged and swallowed. It was a muddy hill, probably made when the aquifer burst, mud and stone and broken things mashed together, shaped and formed into a little island. Half a building had collapsed on it, the concrete strikingly dry and barren to what she was used to.

Digging her feet in, Taylor shut her eyes and stuck her fingers into the muddy hill, pulled herself up, up and onto where it plateaued. Her breathing was heavy, wet against the back of her mask, but it didn’t matter, she made it, this was all she had left in her. She was _tired_ , she shouldn’t’ve survived, she should’ve died, died with Lisa and Brian and her father.

“Hey,” a voice croaked, sounding weak. A girl with copper hair, caked with blood, eyes hazy and lips chapped, stared up at her, her body twisted, bent by the weight of debris that had settled over everything beneath her ribcage. Emma was still pretty, strikingly so, even when half-buried beneath a building, even when Taylor had expected her, expected her face, known she was here for close to an hour.

Taylor reached up, numb fingers tugging at the buckles around her mask, stretchy fabric giving, some of it even tearing. Her breath came as a gasp as she sucked in the fresh air, only to be rebuffed by the scent of blood and death and rot. She braved it, even when the bile crawled into her throat, ached in her chest in a way that made her wonder if she’d burn a hole through her throat if she remained this way, if that might kill her when an Endbringer didn’t.

“Hey Emma,” Taylor replied back, her own voice hoarse, harsh. Emma just looked at her, eyes glazed, but not unseeing, uncomprehending before sliding into acceptance, into understanding. Swallowing the knot in her throat, she crawled forward, tried not to think of the times they shared as kids, the times she’d crawled just like this across the floor of Emma’s bedroom, slipping from sleeping bag into bed, huddling together with little giggles. It felt like decades ago since then, even if it had been barely three years.

Stopping just short of Emma, Taylor finally let the last vestiges of strength slip out of her. Her arms were the first to falter, slumping into herself, face meeting the mix of sharp concrete and mud. She let herself lay there, face-down, body a mess of bruises and heavy, fatigued aches, before forcing herself up, pushing onto her side so that her hair, matted and muddy, pillowed her head, stopped her from sinking into the drying surface of the hill.

Emma looked at her, understood things Taylor couldn’t imagine. “It’s been a long time,” Emma said gently, voice coming back to her now, no longer so much of a croak. “Since we talked—I mean.”

“Yeah,” Taylor echoed, eyes hazy, her glasses half-broken, the crack that ran down the middle of one lens twisting the way Emma appeared, made part of her larger than the rest. “Yeah, it has been.”

“I was strong,” Emma blurted out suddenly, quietly. There was something thick in her voice, something needy and feral. “I was, I swear, I—I had to be.”

Throat blocked, heavy, Taylor reached out and brushed fingers through Emma’s bangs, pulling them away from her face when she hadn’t been able to. There was nothing she could say to that, nothing that could fix this, fix Emma’s broken body, fix their broken relationship, but—but Mom, she’d always put importance on _intent_ , on comfort. So that’s all Taylor could do, she could only comfort, could only comb shaking, weak fingers through the snarls and catches in Emma’s hair, ignoring the sting in her own eyes.

“You understand, right?” Emma babbled thoughtlessly, eyes unfocused, hazy, someplace else. “They would’ve taken everything, taken my eyes, my face, ruined me.” she sucked in a breath, harsh, wheezy in a way that Taylor wasn’t sure was from the damage to her body or from a concerted effort not to cry. “I was strong.”

Breathing in sharply, Taylor tried to banish the burn in her eyes, to little avail. “You were,” she found herself saying, soothing. Comfort, she had to make Emma comfortable, had to make her time remaining as okay as possible. It was all she could do, all she could _manage_. “So strong,” the words slipped out, an afterthought, barely spoken, more breathed. “You were always stronger than you thought you were.”

Emma’s laugh was wet, red that Taylor had once thought was lipstick stained her chin a little, dripping like drool. Reaching down, Taylor smeared the heel of her palm along Emma’s chin, wiped away the blood, swallowing back the retch that it wanted to urge out of her. She had to be strong, stronger than she was at school, stronger than she was, facing down Leviathan.

“I was,” Emma repeated thoughtlessly, eyes empty, so far away. Taylor wanted to pull her back, to shake and yank and beg for comfort, to curl up in Emma’s chest and smell the peppermint scent she wore, to wear Emma’s sheets like a second skin, but stopped herself. For all that her body was sore and tired, she was not dying; Emma was.

Emma was _dying_.

Taylor shuddered, a little sob slipping out before she could stop it, shoulders shaking in harsh stutters. Emma’s eyes refocused up at her - she’d crawled a little more, she hovered over Emma now, less laid beside - and blinked when one of her tears slipped, fell and freckled the surface of Emma’s forehead. Taylor bit it back, bit down on her lip until it burned and bled, until she was drinking in her own blood just as much as she drank in the air, her breath wheezy, broken.

“Oh, Taylor,” Emma said, softly, almost lovingly. She had no hands to do so, arms crushed beneath rebar, twisted and mutilated, but the twitch of her shoulder almost made it seem like she’d tried to reach out, to comfort. “You’ll be okay,” she soothed, gentle voiced, comforting when she shouldn’t be, when she should take and take and take, when she should rip the comfort out of Taylor’s bones, flay her alive just to make sure her passing was anything but cruel and violent.

“Prop me up against your legs?” Emma asked, voice here, present, drawing her back. Taylor nodded wetly, one hand coming up to wipe at her face, pushing snot and salty tears away, driving them back into her skull, begging them away. She used her other to lift, drawing a quiet noise of pain out of Emma, but not enough to stop. She positioned them, hooked her legs beneath Emma’s neck, let her adjust and moved herself until, with a contentful sigh, Emma’s head was resting in the crook of her thigh, cheek pressed into the fabric of her costume, looking almost at peace.

“Like old times,” Taylor found herself saying vacantly, the tears still there, traitorously burning her skin, marking her, ruining the comfort she could offer. Emma’s weight, her head, her flickering warmth, they were grounding, kept her anchored, even as bleary eyes grew blearier with another upswell of tears, the burn in her eyes growing painful, impossible to ignore.

“Yeah,” Emma echoed, a weak, breathy noise. “Hey, Taylor?”

“Yes?”

“Can you tell me what you’ve been up to, for the last little bit?”

A pause, quiet besides the shifting water, the sound of distant overhead rescue vehicles.

“Okay.”

* * *

Water stretched on, eddying with tides, murky brown. Things stuck up at odd intervals, spikes of rebar, concrete, metal and glass shining through the grime and grit, slick and shiny with water. There wasn’t anything left of Brockton, she could see that clearly from her place far above; the world was little more than a vast, muddy sea, the ruins of her life drowned beneath it.

Shaking her head to clear her thoughts, Victoria pushed her flight on, ignoring the twinge in her side; an untreated bruise that had worsened over the hours, marking her ribcage like an ugly handprint. She wondered if she had broken a rib in the fight, was jostling it free in her flying, but swallowed back the urge to make a complaint about it, to justify going back, sitting down, and giving herself a break. If she stopped, even for a moment, she’d have to _think_ , and thinking wasn’t conductive right now, not anymore.

Crawling to a slightly less harsh speed, Victoria brought her new armband up. It was a bulky thing, with boxy edges that framed the majority of her forearm; made cooperatively by Dragon and Armsmaster, specifically for search and rescue. Wiping the flat of her thumb over the screen to clear up the foggy glass, she made sure she was still in the grid she’d flown out to check before finally dragging her thumb down against one of the bulky, mechanical keyboard-esque buttons just beneath it. The little square of area flashed once, twice, then three times as she held, before the wireframe outline turned red, and ‘NA’ flickered into place in its center. _None alive_.

Swallowing, Victoria angled her flight, moving towards the block just north of her. Even while she flew fast, even when she pushed, pressed the limits of her power, of her body, her icon on the armband crawled exhaustingly slowly, a reminder of just how much had been lost, how much everyone had lost.

On any other day, it would be a beautiful time to fly. The sky was clear and empty, the winds rolled sedately, comfortingly, but then that was the ultimate irony, wasn’t it? It was always beautiful after a storm, always clear, like the world had just worked through a bout of anger. She didn’t want to fly, she wanted to scream, to shout and punch and kick and _cry_ , but she knew better than that. She had better places to be, better uses, than throwing a tantrum in the refugee camp.

A beep from her armband informed her she’d entered another grid, what had once been part of the downtown area. It was more roughshod than the rest, than the suburbs where houses had been hauled into the ocean, torn apart and splintered into the muddy sand. Here, buildings stood like spikes, accompanied by muddy clumps that had partially dried, leaving them light-brown, baked from the harsh intensity of the sun reflecting off the water, however minimal.

She saw her only seconds later. A girl, costumed, sat on one of those hills, staring off towards a direction with nothing in it, a pile of glass, metal and asphalt in a pile just in front of her. Someone was on her lap, ginger hair shining brightly against a backdrop of browns, blacks and greys, but the other person was unmoving, so still, it made something in Victoria lurch unpleasantly, memories burbling, whispering in her ears, rising to the surface, threatening to overwhelm her for the few short seconds before she shoved it all down, buried it in the pit of her chest, and lied that she’d let them out later, that she’d open the lock and let them flow like they probably should.

Angling her flight, Victoria descended. The smell of rot came first, unpleasant against her face, clinging to her skin, forcing itself into her nostrils. Corpses, bloated with water, dotted the landscape, identifiable as she got closer, however mud-covered they might’ve once been. They didn’t have the resources for a corpse retrieval team, not anymore, so the policy was to just let them be, but even then, it still felt wrong, still made her teeth itch unpleasantly in the roots of her gums.

Skitter - and it had to be, she knew that costume, knew that day of her life like the back of her hand - looked dead to the world, she didn’t even respond as she passed through the air, getting closer. Her mask had been discarded at some point, left half-torn at the side of the hill, sunken partially into the mud and then cooked into place. Even as she landed, feet pressing unpleasantly into the crusty surface of the mud, threatening to sink in, the villain didn’t even twitch.

The corpse on her lap, face pale, eyes closed, and body unmoving, was telling.

“Skitter?” She asked, getting a bare twitch, a shudder, out of the girl. Her head turned, and Victoria nearly recoiled at the stare; dead, empty, unthinking and unfeeling. It was a surprise, seeing what was beneath someone who had felt more like a monster, more like a cloud of antagonistic insects, than a person most of the time. It made the anger in her chest flutter and then die, burned out, too weak to really get anything out of it. The Undersiders had been confirmed dead, the only exception being Skitter herself, did grudges really matter anymore?

Refusing to think about Amy, Victoria focused on Skitter, on her face. Chapped lips, pale skin marked by a worsening sunburn, broken glasses and tangled hair. She looked broken, like a toy that had been bent too far in one direction, splayed out and empty-limbed, something to be tossed away. Disposable.

Breathing in, ignoring the smell of death, Victoria let out a breath. “We need to get you to the camp,” Victoria found herself saying, suffocating the little voice in her head that sounded like her mother, like the mother she no longer had. “You need water, you need food, and you need a place to sleep.”

For a second, from the way Skitter’s body tensed, the way it tightened and hardened, she thought she’d have to make a fight out of it, but only a moment later the energy bled out of the villain in a breath, her shoulders slouching, her eyes lidding. Tears started to form, and weak hiccups rattled up the spine of a broken girl, gusting out through bloody, bitten lips, sounding almost choked off, like her throat was so dry even the air sandpapered against it.

“We’ll have to leave her,” Victoria said, and tried to put steel into her voice she never had, never would. Skitter, complacently, seemed to accept that, though she curled in on herself a bit, shoulders hunched, eyes shutting, another choked off noise breaking free from her mouth, transitioning into a series of coughs and wheezes that hurt to hear. Leaning down, Victoria carefully pressed one hand into Skitter’s shoulder, keeping her steady, as she positioned the too-familiar ginger away, moved her from Skitter’s lap, from the hands that had been unthinkingly brushing through her hair, and let her rest, back straight, on the dry ground.

Without something keeping her sitting as she was, Skitter only curled further in, body twitching as wheezes and little hiccups evolved into full sobs, harsh ones that sounded almost painful. In any other circumstance, handling a villain like this, someone so broken, someone who had been so terrifying, might’ve been comedic, but between herself, the flash of Dean’s dead body, still floating in the back of her skull, and the corpses around them, there was no humour to be had, nothing fun about it.

Tucking one arm beneath Skitter’s legs and another one at the crook of her back, Victoria hauled her up with uncomfortable ease. Even with her super strength, her invulnerability, the thing that had saved her at the end of the day, she was still too light, too fragile. She felt like one of those old dolls made out of thin wooden sticks, dried out from age and disuse, left dusty in the attic, something that would break and snap with any mishandling.

Pulling free from gravity, Victoria ascended, carrying Skitter all the while. The smell of rot, of mud and copper pennies, stopped chasing her so fiercely the higher she got, but it was slow to start. She couldn’t go too quick, the fragility of the person screaming in the back of her skull, memories of shattered arms and bodies prickling at her focus, reminding her just what she could do, given the opportunity. Skitter cried, little sobs shaking out from an otherwise limp body, not uncooperative, not struggling against her, but not even trying to work with her, to help her keep her grip steady as she started the long, long journey back to the camp.

“Can you press the button on my armband?” Victoria found herself asking once they’d ascended high enough, once the air had thinned just a bit, once the air had a little bite to it that it normally lacked. Skitter twitched, confused, before glancing at the bit of technology that jut out from beneath too-skinny thighs, the single mechanical key a glaring, neon-red. She didn’t do anything for a moment, and for a while, Victoria had resigned herself to getting yelled at for not sending out a ping to base camp, but with shaky, trembling fingers, Taylor tapped the button. The ping was sent, and the tiny little box at the top corner of the screen ticked from 0142 to 0143; the grand sum of nearly a day of search and rescue in a city that had once held over three hundred and fifty thousand.

“She used to be my life, you know?” Skitter said, seconds later, her voice hoarse and dry, cracked and scabbed like the earth she’d been sitting on. "We... drifted apart in high school, but..."

Victoria sucked in a breath, tried to banish the rapid-fire memories of Dean's corpse face down, bloated and sickly in the eddying waves.

"I..." Skitter choked, her curly hair hung limp in front of her face, eyes staring unthinkingly at her own hands, fingers laced, clenched hard enough to look painful. "I have nobody left." It was almost a whisper.

They flew high enough that the debris below looked small, faded little dots throughout a vast churning field of brown-blue. Skitter hadn't moved much, but her breathing had evened out, coming out steady instead of as shaky, miserable wheezes.

"I wish I had spent more time doing... normal things," Skitter whispered absently, sounding so very small, unlike the monstrous image of churning hornets and blackflies that Victoria had come to associate her with. "Maybe I could've had more time with Dad, with Emma."

Victoria let out a breath, angling her flight towards the blurry horizon. "You'll have time now," she confided, sounding more sure than she felt. "We all will. To heal, to make amends."

Skitter choked, the noise sliding into a laugh, harsh, but not angry. It, at least, was better than the emptiness that had since plagued her voice. “What’s even left?” she whispered, almost a plea. It was bizarre to hear her pleading, to hear someone who had robbed a bank with spiders and fire, begin to break down again, begin to shake and shudder, sobs slipping out, tears wet on her cheeks.

“I don’t know,” Victoria admitted, and found that saying it felt true, felt right. She didn’t know, wouldn’t know, not until search and rescue were finished, but, even then... “If there isn’t anything, then you’ll just have to find something again.”

Skitter swallowed, the noise harsh, thick, like she was trying to swallow a baseball, but said nothing.

Neither of them did, not for the rest of the flight.


End file.
